Even though there’s a lot of truth in The Oatmeal’s “8 Websites You Need to Stop Building” (and despite this blog coming perilously close to #5 on the list), this week’s latest “must-have” iOS app – SocialPhone, which has been touted as the integrated social media dashboard we’ve all been wishing for – sounds like a pretty good exception to the “for goodness’ sake, don’t build us another Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/whatever interface” rule. If nothing else, at an intro price of $1.99, it sounds like a reasonable gamble with a huge payoff should it be even a so-so solution to the social network schizophrenia that comes with using multiple services. Cult of Mac loves SocialPhone, too, which is a fairly sound endorsement.

So am I missing something here? I’ve been using it most of the week – or, more accurately, trying really hard to use it and then turning back to my old friends Echofon, HootSuite and (even though it’s still pretty awful) the official Facebook iPhone app. (LinkedIn just gets to wait until I’m in front of my laptop.) Granted, the contacts interface is beautiful, particularly the “cover flow”-style thumbnail display of all my friends and a “Contact CleanUp” feature that did a very good job of tidying the name and number redundancies in my messy address book. And sure, it’s nice to see my contacts’ activity on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter in a single stream. But what happens when I want to respond to something someone says? Forget the 140-character barrier on Twitter versus Facebook’s space to yammer on for ages (not to mention preview links without the reader having to click on anything) – beyond that, there’s a bigger mode-of-communication argument to think about.

In short, even though we’d all like to have a central portal for viewing and updating our social networks, the ways in which we interact with each have grown up to be so fundamentally different that it might not be possible – at least not in a way that aggregates the best features of all. Sure, I can use a service like check.in for a Foursquare/Gowalla double whammy everywhere I go, but by doing so I’m missing out on Foursquare’s elegant “nearby specials” offers, which is – at least for now – the service’s primary commercial reason to exist. Does this mean that when I get tired of checking in twice over every time I go somewhere, I ditch both services and just go with Facebook Places, which as of this week finally has its own Deals specials? Facebook’s certainly banking on it.

So that’s the question, really: Will we finally get sick of the social media schizophrenia and settle on one or two services? Depending on who you ask, the recent Pew study saying only 4 percent of online Americans use location-based services either backs up this claim, or just echoes the same sort of dismal figures Twitter had right before it really exploded in popularity. And since so much of social media is really uncharted territory, there’s not really much of an analogue for the current situation; the closest parallel might be our shift in shopping behaviors from main-street stores to malls full of individual shops and then “big box” retailers on the edge of town.

What do you think? Will Facebook become the Wal-Mart of social media? Will it save our sanity, or will we suffer in other ways from centralization? Or both? Let us know in the comments.